President Obama’s staff began briefing House and Senate staffers on the 2010 budget yesterday with details of a major down payment on health care reform and tax hikes, true to his pledge Tuesday night.

The overhaul will be partially funded by allowing the Bush tax cuts to die quietly in their sleep at the end of next year, reducing farm subsidies and eliminating tax shelters for folks making over $250K — which is all supposed to add up to $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.

The Republicans are already raising a ruckus, Nancy Pelosi is raising fresh doubts about Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan and a two-party-ish vote on the omnibus yesterday is raising hopes that bipartisanship is not completely dead. (Yeah, right.)

It’s just another ho-hum hundreds-of-billions Thursday and you’re in The Huddle.

$634 BILLION. POLITICO’s David Rogers reports that the Obama administration’s fiscal 2010 spending plan is a remarkable break from Bush-era budgeting, with a commitment to pump $634 billion into a health care fund that would be financed by a variety of tax changes guaranteed to make the GOP howl.

Rogers: “Hard on the heels of Obama’s speech to Congress, administration officials began briefing lawmakers Wednesday on their proposals including the health care reserve fund: half of which would come from health-related expenses and half by scaling back the value of itemized deductions for wealthier taxpayers.

Within the $2 trillion in savings, for example, the budget is expected to limit agriculture subsidies to farms earning more than $500,000, resulting in an estimated saving near $16 billion. Large charitable deductions — used to shelter income — would face new limits, and Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy would expire after 2010.”

“TBD.” WaPo’s Lori Montgomery points out that the balance of the funding for the health care effort is left more or less blank.

The budget documents don’t say “how the administration hopes to raise the rest of the money -- hundreds of billions of dollars more. ‘TBD’ has been penciled into categories for cost savings and benefit reductions,” she writes.

So far, the plan is getting high marks for factoring in worst-case funding scenarios in Iraq and including defense appropriations in the main budget, a stark departure from the Bush administration, which was often accused of low-balling and pushing war costs to stand-alone emergency bills.

But high-balling Iraq expenses has a political benefit for Obama — allowing him to claim greater-than-expected savings up the road if his projections proved to be too high.

Montgomery: “A big chunk of the rest of the savings comes from measuring Obama's plans against an unrealistic scenario in which the Iraq war continues to suck up $170 billion a year forever.”

CAP-AND-TRADE = MIDDLE CLASS TAX CUTS. Jackie Calmes and Robert Pear of the Times report that Obama will link his environmental and tax policies by proposing “a plan under which companies must buy permits to exceed pollution emission caps — to pay for an extension of a two-year tax credit that benefits low-wage and middle-income people.”

PELOSI VS. OBAMA ON IRAQ. Pelosi – forced to abandon her hopes of killing the Bush tax cuts immediately – is turning up the heat on the White House on Iraq, telling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow she’s displeased with leaked details of Obama’s plan to retain a residual 50,000-troop force in the country after the main draw-down.

If Pelosi pushes the point — and her language seems uncharacteristically confrontational — it could set up a serious showdown between the new president and his most reliable ally on the Hill. More likely, it will force Obama to make some kind of accommodation to Pelosi, who has taken bullets for the White House on TARP and the stimulus.

MADDOW: “Doesn't 50,000 seem like an awful lot of residual force?”

PELOSI: “It does, it does. I completely agree with that. And the president hasn't made a statement, so I don't know what he's going to say. I know that the rumor is — and I don't know what the justification is for 50,000, at the present, the 50,000 troops in Iraq. I do think that there's a need for some. I don't know that all of them have to be in country. They can be platformed outside.

But I'll just be interested to see what the president has to say. But I do think that — I would think a third of that, maybe 20,000, a little more than a third, 15,000 or 20,000.”

254 LITTLE BIDENS. House Democratic campaign sachem Chris Van Hollen has quietly sent his members a request that they delegate a staffer to help the locals access stimulus cash while providing a modicum of ground-level oversight — in hopes of creating an army of House-level Joe Bidens. (Obama has tasked his veep with national recovery oversight.)

“It will be the job of this individual to provide guidance, answer questions, coordinate with state officials, research formulas and application processes, write support letters, and troubleshoot for worthy individuals, government entities, groups or organizations who would like to access funds,” Van Hollen's staff wrote in a letter obtained by The Hill’s Jared Allen.

BIPARTISANSHIP LIVES. THEN DIES AGAIN. The House passed a hardly noticed $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill yesterday — with 16 Republicans defecting to the Democratic side, a sign that the flame of bipartisanship still flickers weakly in the lower chamber.

But POLITICO’s Charles Mahtesian and Patrick O’Connor say it’s no harbinger of comity — because GOP leaders seem to be staking their collective future on marshaling near-unanimous “no” votes against major Obama initiatives.

“For Republicans, a central question looms: Is saying no to Obama’s agenda the way to get voters to say yes to an already beleaguered GOP brand?

Despite two consecutive election thrashings, and despite Obama’s high approval ratings and their own low standing, Republicans have wagered that the return to the majority is paved by unwavering opposition to further spending, an audacious bet that won’t pay out for another 21 months.

If Republicans are right, the economy will remain in tatters and voters will recognize in 2010 that the recovery was delayed by profligate Democrats and their president.

If the GOP is wrong, however, and the economy begins to show signs of life, the resistance will be easily framed as reflexive obstructionism, the last gasp of an intellectually bankrupt party.”

BROWNBACK ETHICS COMPLAINT. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan good-government group, filed a Senate ethics complaint against Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) over the use of faux Senate letterhead in a fundraising letter on behalf a conservative Catholic group.

Me, again: “Brownback’s office initially denied knowledge of the letter — which bore his signature — but POLITICO obtained an e-mail from Brownback’s chief of staff admitting that a campaign staffer gave approval in early 2008.”

"OBAMA IS SPENDING OUR MONEY LIKE A DRUNKEN SAILOR!" ==== MORE THAN ANY PAST PRESIDENT, WE SEE PHOTOS OF OBAMA WITH A DRINK IN HIS HAND --- IS IT POSSIBLE HE IS DRUNK WHEN HE COMES UP WITH HIS POLICY IDEAS? === HE IS AN ADMITTED DRUG USER === BETWEEN A MESSIAH COMPLEX AND ALCOHOL CONSUMATION --- ARE WE SAFE WITH OBAMA? (P.S. --- in any event, Obama is not much of a role model for young people!)."OBAMA IS SPENDING OUR MONEY LIKE A DRUNKEN SAILOR!" IS HE REALLY DRUNK?